Sharon Higgins
CFL.ca
In 2003 Tom was the head coach of the Edmonton Eskimos. During that year our house was subject to the peaks and valleys of the football seasons, not unlike myself, Tom and our family. It has been Good, Bad and Ugly.
Let’s start with the ugly. It was a Friday night and the kids and I had just pulled up in the driveway after winning a football game. The car lights glanced across our garage door as it lifted to the ceiling of the garage. Something was just not right about the hue being cast on it as we waited for this procedure to take place.
Upon closer inspection it was glistening wet with blobs of something and small pieces of green and gold concave plastic adorned the ground beneath it. It was apparent that someone had paint balled the front of our house, specifically targeting the white garage door. Streams of green and gold paint sparkled everywhere in the moonlight. A call to the police, a report filed and it was lights out until the next day when the arduous clean up began.
Then there was the bad. We woke to a beautiful, summer day, to see many empty green garbage bags on our front lawn with their contents strewn from one side of our property to the other. Before we even had time to digest how or why this would have happened, one of our neighbours arrived to inquire about the trash. Feeling very overwhelmed by the clean up ahead of us and not really wanting to start, we retreated to the breakfast table. Moments later we heard the detectible sound of a garden rake. Our neighbours had quickly banned their garden tools together, backed a truck up to our yard, and had the clean up well underway.
Good. It was really ‘good’ when we won the Grey Cup that same year. It was also ‘good’ to get home and pick the dog up from the kennel on the way. But it was ‘really good’ when I pulled in that same driveway which only months earlier had been paint balled and used for a garbage dump, to find the entire front of our house decorated with paraphernalia celebrating our win.
Our neighbours had made a sign proudly declaring “Esks # 1”, had an enormous “Congratulations” banner on the garage door, green and gold balloons hanging from every nook and cranny and streamers gracing our front entrance.
Everything in life is presented to us for a purpose. I firmly believe that these three incidents showed us not the bad in people but the good. How incredibly heartwarming for us to have neighbours and friends to help us manage the good, bad and ugly times.
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